Installation
I made work collaboratively with Jennifer Macdonald, as Leone & Macdonald, for more than a decade. The partnership changed how I thought about creative practice. I learned to move between intuition and rigor, to sit in productive silence, to trust the friction. I discovered that I was good at collaboration and that it fueled me in important ways.
As one of the first female art collaboratives in the US, we navigated the polarizing culture wars of the era by producing lyrical, provocative works that invited deliberate contemplation. While many of our peers self-identified as painters or sculptors, we slipped between the labels, taking on whatever form suited our concepts. Together, we went in search of new stories that could yield fresh perspectives on our shared humanity.
In 1989, we built an AIDS memorial out of sand, inscribing the names of the dead in Braille, for the first Day Without Art. In 1994, we shredded, boiled, soaked, pulped, and pressed every article of clothing we owned (literally the fabric of our lives) into a thousand sheets of blank paper, for a solo show at the Whitney Museum. In 1996, for a public art commission in Miami, we elicited "passing" stories from residents (drag queens, rabbis, and mall goths among them) and wove first-person accounts of deception, performance, and mis-recognition into a video installation that testifies to the glorious impossibility of a single story.
Our work was included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and is in the Whitney's permanent collection. We exhibited internationally across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia; taught and lectured widely; and received numerous grants and awards.
For more about our collaboration, visit the Leone & Macdonald website.
